


Easy as Breathing

by x_starsmaycollide



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 06:19:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_starsmaycollide/pseuds/x_starsmaycollide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of snapshots/drabbles that look into the lives of Lincoln and Altliv after the events of 4x20, when Lincoln decides to stay in the Altverse, through their reappearance in Liberty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Remember how you said that home is where the heart is? This might be crazy, but I think I’ve found mine.”

 _Might_. Lincoln could have laughed at himself as he explained his situation to Peter. Staying in a different world with another version of a woman he’d loved as the bridge between the two worlds closed forever _might_ sound crazy. Lincoln Lee, a man who always had centered himself in a world of logic and facts and rationality, had no doubt that this was the craziest thing he had ever done or would ever have the chance to do again. And for someone who had always loved words, who had stayed up extra hours writing papers in college choosing each word with the utmost care and consideration, he was having an awfully hard time trying to communicate precisely what he was feeling. 

He’d never been one to grow roots, to feel emotionally tied to places and people that surrounded him. Lincoln hadn’t felt truly at home in many places, and even those instances were so fleeting and brief that he’d learned he could never to hold onto them very long. But the memories of them were burned into Lincoln’s brain: the feeling of his mother’s arms around him, the sound of laughter at Robert’s dinner table… All had been home to him once. And, somehow, among the chaos of Fringe division in his universe and the alternate universe, Lincoln had stumbled upon a new home. A place he belonged. He hadn’t even realized it until Peter himself had commented, “It’s weird to think of never seeing them again.” Then the reality of their situation crashed down on him like a tidal wave. 

No more brainstorming cases, no more car rides to crime scenes, no more scoffing at misunderstood cultural references (he still maintained Batman was way cooler than Mantis) with the playful redhead he’d become accustomed to working with made his universe—the one he was born into, anyway—not one he could bear to stay in. Lincoln’s heart was no longer in this universe—or, rather, it would not be when the two universes were separated. It was a proclamation not grounded in rational thought or in a way he could properly communicate or even process in his own mind, but he could tell Peter understood. 

And as Lincoln watched Olivia’s face shift from confusion to shock to a broad grin as he planted himself beside her in the line of those returning to the other side, he understood, too.


	2. Chapter 2

She’d asked him once if he missed his world.

They had gone out for a drink after work after his first official day as an Altverse resident (or, well, mostly official—his day that had mostly been filled of paperwork and applying for his own ShowMe and other bureaucratic red tape that came with switching universes mid-life). It made for a lot of headaches, and Olivia had offered to take him out for a drink to celebrate the end of his upcoming citizenship. “I don’t know if you can handle it, though,” she’d teased, her green eyes playful and endearing, “what we have over here is a bit stronger than you’re probably used to.”

“Oh, I think I can take it,” Lincoln laughed.

That night they found themselves in a bar, and as his eyes adjusted to the smoky, dimly lit atmosphere Lincoln could have sworn he’d crossed back over to his world. They sat at the bar for a couple hours, talking and drinking (he had to admit she was right—the hard liquor of this world was a little stronger than he was accustomed to) but mostly talking, primarily about her experiences with Fringe Division on his side in the time before he was an agent. “Do you miss it? Over there?” Olivia questioned, taking a drink of some sort of alcohol that had come in a mug that Lincoln wasn’t familiar with.

He thought about it for a moment. Thought about the feeling of waking up that morning and seeing a different sky through the window of his motel room, of attempting to adjust to drinking tea with his breakfast, of seeing a different Olivia Dunham and a different Fringe Division when he went into work. “Well, it has only been a day, so right now it still kind of feels like a vacation with a lot of paperwork,” the corners of his mouth lifted up in a smile. Even with his previous experience cooperating with Olivia and her team, it was another thing completely to wake up knowing that this was his world now. “Mostly I think I’m going to miss the coffee.”


	3. Chapter 3

“I’m not entirely sure about this.”

“Oh, come on, Lincoln! Don’t try telling me you have plenty of things to wear. I’ve seen how quickly my laundry detergent has been disappearing.” In the aftermath of transferring universes, Lincoln had been staying at a hotel funded by Fringe Division and Olivia had offered her washer and dryer for his use. Lincoln had very few clothes—only the ones he had previously been using during his short stays in their world to help with cases. It had taken every argument in the book to drag Olivia’s new companion to a department store less than a week after Lincoln’s permanent arrival in their world. This level of stubbornness was something she could have expected from her world’s Lincoln, but from this one? Not so much.

No response.

“I just don’t understand why you’re being so stubborn about this,” Olivia tried again, sitting outside the dressing room she’d ordered Lincoln into with a few new suits as well as more casual clothes. He couldn’t wear suits all the time. “They’re just clothes.”

Finally, a voice came from inside the dressing room. “Yeah, just clothes, which you’re paying for, in addition to letting me use your washer and dryer, buying my food until the stipend goes through, letting me stay at your apartment when the hotel waiver runs out in two days, and helping me pick out potential apartments of my own.”

Olivia bristled, “Look, Lincoln, if this is some kind of macho alpha male ‘can’t accept help from anyone I need to do it all on my own’ garbage you’re about to spout at me—”

“It’s not, I promise,” Lincoln emerged from the dressing room in the midst of a battle with a new tie. Olivia looked like she would say more, but his puppy eyes got her to hold her tongue. The worst thing about Lincoln’s puppy dog eyes was that they weren’t even intentional, cheesy attempts to disarm her temper—that’s just how they naturally were when he was embarrassed.

 _Oh_.

“I’ve just… I’ve never had to accept this kind of help from anyone before, ever. I’m not used to relying on anyone. And for literally my whole world to change overnight… New job, new clothes, need for a new apartment, new identification, new universe, new everything… It’s a lot. And it’s a lot to feel like you’re relying on someone for all of it,” he sighed, giving up on the tie and removing it. “But I do appreciate your help with everything. I really do.”

Some things about Lincoln Lee never changed, no matter what the universe.

“I understand,” Olivia responded after a couple moments to consider all of this. She motioned for him to hand her the tie. It was bright blue and would go well with the dark gray suit she’d had him try on. “You’d do the same for me, though.” She laid the tie around his shoulders, flattening the wrinkles with her palms. Lincoln nodded slowly. “You don’t have to feel ashamed that you need help, Linc. You switched universes and that is going to take a lot of time to get used to.” Her hands worked steadily, finishing his tie faster than he probably could have. “And just because you’re the only one from Over There here, doesn’t mean you’re alone.”

Olivia stepped back, surveying her work, and turned Lincoln toward the mirror. “You look great,” she grinned. “And, besides, if you really feel that badly about imposing, you can be on dinner duty this week.”


	4. Chapter 4

Cooking had never been Olivia’s strong suit. She’d never been patient enough to spend longer than five minutes preparing anything, and that was the maximum. She’d never felt the need to explain this to anyone until Lincoln’s first night of dinner duty, the day he’d packed his things at the hotel and the couch in her apartment became his temporary home.

“Wow, this is…” Lincoln closed her cupboard, looking grim. “How do you even live like this?”

“Not all of us have the time to cook, okay?” She couldn’t help feeling a little defensive. “After a long, hard day of work the last thing I feel like doing is making a meal.”

Lincoln poked his head in the fridge. “You are, however, perfectly fine with Mrs. Stauffer and Mr. Banquet doing all of your cooking for you,” he pointed to the freezer, practically overflowing with frozen dinners, and then opened the fridge, which contained only a twelve pack of beer, two water bottles, a shady half-drunk gallon of milk, and some sort of cheese singles that could probably be comparable to Kraft, “Followed by cracking open a beer, or five.”

“There are things in the cupboard, too!”

“Yeah, a can of chicken soup and bread.” He shook his head. This was just sad. “Where are your fruits? Where are your vegetables?”

“I take vitamins!”

It took ten more minutes of bickering to get Olivia to agree to a kitchen intervention. Lincoln, who had gotten his official notice of citizenship and ShowMe notice just the day before, took the bus to the store and came back an hour later, arms loaded with bags. She peeked in each, noting a variety of soups, pasta, French bread, chicken filets, ground turkey, rice, various vegetables and fruit and even a few breakfast items before Lincoln carted the bags away from the table and began filing things away in the cupboards. He rambled as he put things away, talking about different dishes he was thinking about making for supper—a couple of them she wasn’t even sure had been made in her world before. 

“I didn’t realize you were so interested in the culinary arts,” Olivia watched, quite clueless about what he was actually saying.

“Well, I’m no Gordon Ramsey or anything, but—”

“Who?”

“Nevermind,” he picked up the French bread. “Can you slice this in pieces? Kind of like garlic bread?” Lincoln didn’t seem to have much faith in her ability to use a knife, but she let it slide. She was probably a bit out of practice. As she dug through the silverware drawer to find a knife, Lincoln set to work heating the stove. Before long, he had tomatoes and garlic and a couple other assorted vegetables out for her to mince. “You really are good at this,” she marveled.

“I’ve had quite a bit of practice. After my mother died, Dad wasn’t much into cooking. Even when he started running the store, he never had time or energy to deal with it, so I picked up a few things.” He really was much too humble. Olivia shook her head, watching him mince several cloves of garlic with what looked like a single flick of the wrist. 

“Well then, Chef, I guess you’ll just have to show me how it’s done.”

Lincoln really was quite the teacher; matter of fact, but patient, letting her help with more than just mincing once she got into the feel of things. She even put on the radio as they cooked, the kitchen in her tiny apartment full of life now with music and the smell of baking bread and melting cheese. And as they sat down to dinner with their bruschetta and glasses of wine, still laughing over the state of her kitchen cabinets before Lincoln had his intervention, Olivia realized that perhaps cooking wasn’t quite so bad after all.


	5. Chapter 5

In the time that Lincoln stayed at Olivia’s apartment, he’d come to discover she was a bit of a pack rat. Or, at least, he’d had the suspicion that she was a bit of a pack rat—he was never positive until he emerged from the shower one evening to find her sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by boxes with the closet propped open. Various pictures, papers, and art projects were scattered on the floor around her.

“Memory lane, huh?” Lincoln picked up a picture of two teenage girls, taken from behind as they leapt simultaneously off diving boards into what looked to be a public pool. “Is that one you?” He sat down among the boxes, pointing to the slightly older looking one of the two girls. She appeared to be a bit taller (though it was hard to tell because the other was getting ready to do a cannonball) and a bit more athletic with red hair that looked like it was on fire in the bright sunlight.

Olivia looked up from a journal, “I suppose you could say that.” She looked at the picture he’d picked up, taking it for a moment. “Yeah, that one’s me. And that was my sister, Rachel.” 

It was hard to miss the past tense in her statement. She’d mentioned Rachel before, but he never pried. Going through the death of a loved one was hard enough—living without them, only being able to refer to them in past tense in stories, was harder still. “How old were you in this?”

“Not legal, so you can stop checking out my young ass,” she laughed.

Lincoln laughed, too. “Come on, you know that wasn’t what I meant. I don’t have much of a frame for estimation since I’ve only seen a couple older pictures.”

“It came from my high school box, so I was about sixteen. It was probably around the same time I wrote this,” Olivia motioned to the purple, paisley-patterned book with ‘Olivia’s Journal’ written in loopy cursive on the front. Lincoln’s eyebrow raised at the writing—it wasn’t exactly Olivia’s style. His skepticism was noted and she laughed, “I got Rachel to write it for me. She always had nicer handwriting. I was in that awkward stage of not quite feeling like I fit in my own skin yet, like nothing I did was quite right.” 

He knew that feeling. “So what brought on the nostalgia?”

“I got a letter today about my high school reunion,” Olivia motioned to a discarded envelope off to the side stamped with ‘U.S. Mail Service’. “I’m not sure if I’m going to go or not. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant time period, but I still try to hold on to what I can. I took those days so for granted, acting like every problem was the end of the world as I knew it,” she laughed. “Maybe if things were different, I wouldn’t go, but since…” Her eyes looked back to the photograph, not entirely certain how to put what she was thinking into words.

“But since she can’t, you think you should,” Lincoln finished for her, picking up another picture of the two smiling teenagers from the pile. “If it would make you feel better, I can tag along. I’m interested to see what this young Olivia was like, anyway.”


	6. Chapter 6

It had taken Lincoln and Olivia awhile to get around to apartment hunting for several reasons. The first was that they had been terribly busy with work. Fringe Division had been bustling since the world started healing, free of the clashing with its alternate counterpart that had been so prevalent in the more recent years of its history. After a long day of work, neither felt much like scouring the city for apartments—or perhaps that was just their excuse. The second reason neither had been particularly hasty about the whole thing was they just genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. There was something about the two of them that just worked, no matter what the setting. They made great partners. They made great friends. And they made great roommates.

But there was only so long they could keep putting off an apartment hunt. The time came when the piles of highlighted newspaper clippings sitting on Olivia’s kitchen counter could no longer be ignored, each one dismissed as being too big, too small, too expensive, not in a good neighborhood, or any of the other various faults they could find in any of the apartment ads. The time came where Lincoln packed his things and Olivia drove him to his new place—a beautiful little one bedroom place across town with an excellent kitchen and a great view of the city that was in a neighborhood that neither could find any faults in.

At least, no faults that weren’t, ‘but it’s not with me’.

“Well, this is it, I guess,” Lincoln set down his box of clothes while Olivia took the dining utensils to the kitchen. “Home sweet home.”

“I wouldn’t call it home yet, Linc. Not ‘til you put some life in this place,” she laughed. The apartment was a little barren, as Lincoln still didn’t have very many possessions. He’d only been in their world a few months and most of what he owned was clothes.

“It’ll get there. It has potential,” Lincoln defended. “I pick up the TV tomorrow and the couch will be here later tonight. That will give the place some life.” They both laughed and looked around, neither not entirely certain what to say or even do now. It was a somber, awkward silence.

“Well, I will let you enjoy your new place, then,” Olivia forced a smile and Lincoln walked back to the door. They hugged for several moments before Olivia finally stepped back. “Remember, you can call if you need anything.”

“Absolutely.”

“See you tomorrow.” 

That night she made dinner alone, frying chicken and rice with vegetables and sitting down to eat by herself. Even sitting on her couch, which had been Lincoln’s bed, felt strange. The past months she’d mostly used her chair so Lincoln felt like he had a space that was actually his. And the silence, the feeling of no other life being in that apartment, was bizarre. She turned on music as she cooked. She flipped on the TV as she ate. But it was weird.

Aesthetically, nothing had changed. All her decorations that had been there the past two months were in the same spots. It looked the same, it smelled the same, it was the exact same place.

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all.


	7. Chapter 7

“What do you mean only one room was reserved?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. There must have been a system error,” an apologetic twenty-something female typed furiously at the front desk of a motel, “or whoever called in for your room made a mistake.” Neither could say for sure, as it had been Charlie that had called the hotel while they were working a case.

He wouldn't purposely book only one room for them on their out of town trip, right? Especially one with just one bed.

“And there are no other rooms available?” Lincoln inquired. Not that he was particularly concerned-- he and Liv were used to sharing small spaces. But even a tiny one bed motel room was a bit cozier than they were accustomed to. 

The brunette at the desk (her name tag read 'April') shook her head, “Sorry, sir. With the reunion in town, everything has been booked up. The one bed is all we've got for the night.”

Olivia and Lincoln glanced at each other. “We’ll go ahead and take it, then. I can sleep on the floor,” Lincoln took the key card and the two set off for the room, exiting the front doors of the motel to find the designated room number.

“We’re here two nights. I can take the bed tonight and you can take it tomorrow,” Olivia shrugged, stopping to grab her bag from the car before turning back again with a grin. “And in the meantime, it looks like we’re roommates again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your comments so far. I really enjoy hearing your feedback! Things have been absolutely insane lately with coming back to school after spring break, so I'm sorry if updates take me a bit longer to get to. This one is a bit short and sweet, but soon I'm hoping to get into some more heavy hitting stuff that I think you guys will enjoy. Feel free to let me know if there's any potential scenarios you want to see in this fic! It was originally intended to be a small, few-chapter effort, and turned into something a little more massive, so I'm really open to ideas. Thank you guys again for everything!
> 
> xxx,  
> Jenn, your friendly neighborhood fic writer


	8. Chapter 8

There had been few things that broke his heart more than the way she’d cried after her reunion, drunk off of shots, her face hot with tears she tried to desperately to suppress. They spilled out slowly at first, buried so deep inside of her that he wondered how long she’d been keeping them down, and then all at once, her body wracked with sobs as she nestled into his shoulder as they sat on their motel room bed.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m trying to stop. I hate crying,” Olivia’s voice cracked, burying her face in his jacket. “I just miss her so much.”

“Shhh,” Lincoln whispered, kissing the top of her head softly. She cried so hard her body quaked, her hand clutching his like a life raft in a storm as they waited for the hurricane to pass. About five minutes later, she’d calmed down slightly, her breathing returning to normal. “I tried… I tried this last time, after Lincoln, too,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and quiet and still slurring slightly. He assumed ‘this’ meant the countless shots she’d done after saying she wanted to go to the bar across from the motel after the reunion. It seemed like countless people that night had approached them to express their condolences about Rachel. “I should have known it wouldn’t help now, either. It’s just so hard…”

“It’s okay to miss them, Liv. It’s okay to cry.”

“It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like, because they’re not here, I have to be strong. They wouldn’t want me to hurt. They would want me to keep going.”

He thought about this for a moment. “There’s a difference between hurting and suffering. What they wouldn’t want you to do is suffer—to keep trying to bury what you’re feeling, carrying it for years until you physically can’t. I think they would be okay with the hurting in the short term if it meant you weren’t suffering for so long.” She seemed to think about this for several minutes before finally nodding into his shoulder. “This one time, not too long ago, my entire world completely changed. Literally. Everything was different—I was somewhere completely new. For awhile, I wasn’t really sure how to deal with that. And I remember very clearly the time a good friend told me I wasn’t alone. Told me that, even in a parallel universe with nothing to show for myself except the clothes on my back, I was never alone.”

Lincoln could feel her smile against his arm.

“I’m not alone, either,” she concluded softly with a light laugh. Liv’s eyes closed, body finally allowing itself to relax back into homeostasis.

They sat like that for a long time—hands clasped, her head resting on his shoulder—until Olivia drifted off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update took far longer than I originally anticipated to write. A couple weeks ago I was hit with a stomach virus (word of warning-- don't get them, they're gross) and then was hit with a ton of homework due to missed school from the stomach virus, as well as a friend of mine going through a really tough time. It doesn't help that I rewrote this particular chapter like three times over the course of the past couple days. Basically, things have been insane, but I hope this chapter (and fic in general I hope maybe???) is good enough that you guys will forgive me for such sporadic updating! Thanks a ton for all of your reviews. It means SO MUCH for me to know you all are enjoying what I'm writing.


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